With scores of flirtatious users trying to post risqué photos of themselves on popular location-based dating app Skout, the site needed eyeballs to screen every submission. Lots of eyeballs.

So they turned to venture-funded CrowdFlower, a leading crowd-sourced labor firm that farms out online “microtasks” to contributors doing digital piecework for a few extra bucks. The idea: Harness the power of the masses to collaborate in real-time on a large problem. The assignment from Skout: Help us stem the tide of booty calls.

It’s the type of job CrowdFlower was built to handle. Co-founder and CEO Lukas Biewald, 30, was working at a search-engine startup in 2007 that needed a continual flow of “human judgments” to see how various algorithms affected the relevance of results. Instead of outsourcing the work to a traditional — and costly — offline labor pool, Biewald thought, “Why not put the project online, pay people a few cents per microtask and have them do it in their own free time?”

We spoke with Biewald recently. His comments have been edited for length and clarity.

Q OK, let’s start with the name. It’s kind of out there, no?

A It’s one of those quick decisions you make, not realizing at the time the eventual impact. But in the early days, since my partner and I were engineers and I live near Dolores Park, we called our startup Dolores Labs. But some customers said they didn’t like having ‘lab’ in the name because it reminded them of experimentation.

We kicked around some other names like CrowdFlow, but couldn’t get the domain name. Then we saw CrowdFlower was available, and since we love plants we went with it. People complained about it at first, saying things like, “No man wants to work at a place called anything-flower.” But it’s worked out. We’ve gone from two guys in a coffee shop to 40 employees and more than 2 million people doing meaningful work.

Q Where did the idea come from?

A I was working at a startup at the time, trying to build a new and better search engine. The problem was, how do you know it’s better than other engines? It seems simple, but it’s actually hard, and it’s a lot of work. It gets complicated, but we’d come up with a bunch of algorithms to help pull up the most relevant search results. So when someone types in, say, the Mercury News, do you want them led to the home page or the breaking news page or something else? So we’d hire contributors to run a bunch of random queries and then have them rate the results, essentially “training” the algorithms to do better searches.

Q How do you find your workers? And how much can they earn for these microtasks?

A We call the workers “contributors” and today we partner with a lot of these work-at-home websites where people will find these opportunities to earn a bit of extra money in their free time. You can make anything from a few dollars an hour and up if you’re aggressive at it. But you have to pick the right jobs and you have to be accurate. We pay different amounts for different tasks, and if a job’s going slow, we might raise the price contributors are paid.

But the craziest thing is that we partner with game sites where contributors get paid in virtual currency. And about half our work gets paid out that way, which shows you how much people value their avatars.

Q What’s your labor pool look like?

A We now have more than 2 million contributors worldwide, with a bit more of them in the United States than in Europe. It’s always been a bit more female and increasingly so. In the U.S., it’s a bit more Midwest than coastal. The typical age is in their 30s, but we also have a lot of retired people doing this work in their free time.

Q So tell us about your work with Skout, the dating app that uses you to help keep their site wholesome, right?

A Skout sends us a bunch of user photos all day every day, even in the middle of the night. Our system sends them on to contributors standing by and we say, “There’s work available here.” This all happens in nanoseconds. We say, “We’ll pay you 5 cents or 5 virtual dollars if you check out these images,” and we only send to contributor sites where we can verify the appropriate age of workers.

We’ll also have a couple of people look at each image, and if they both agree that the photo’s acceptable and doesn’t show nudity, we send it back to Skout and they post it. But if the two contributors disagree over the appropriateness of a photo, we’ll then get more people to check the image. This all happens in real time, around the clock.

With what we call this sort of “image moderation” work, though, it’s hard to make a lot of money because the people looking at all these photos often don’t work aggressively at it. They tend to think of it as fun.

Contact Patrick May at 408-920-5689.

LUKAS BIEWALD

Birth date: Sept. 5, 1981Birthplace: BostonPosition: Co-founder/CEO, CrowdFlowerPrevious jobs: Senior scientist and manager within the ranking and management team at Powerset, a natural language search technology company later acquired by Microsoft. Biewald has also led the search relevance team for Yahoo Japan.Education: Bachelor’s degree in mathematics, master’s in computer science, both at StanfordFamily: Parents and a sister in BostonResidence: San Francisco

Source: CrowdFlower

FIVE FACTS ABOUT LUKAS BIEWALD

1. He is an avid boxer. He started about six years ago as a way to vent stress and anger. On his list of fellow boxers is Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life.

2. He has a three-foot glass tank on his desk which contains a very large pickled squid named Dr. Squidly, which stays pickled by having its tank filled with gin every month.

3. He is a talented illustrator whose favorite subject is animals. He was first inspired by an oversize stuffed toy alligator named Mr. Chompy. His obsession with drawing alligators in 2010 changed to hippos in 2011. For 2012, he predicts crabs will be the mascot of choice.

4. He is an avid Go and chess player. No one at CrowdFlower has ever beat him at Go. He can often play both Go and chess simultaneously and wins both.

5. He loves plants. There are plants all over his apartment and in the office. Even the conference rooms are filled with plants.

Patrick May is an award-winning writer for the Bay Area News Group working with the business desk as a general assignment reporter. Over his 34 years in daily newspapers, he has traveled overseas and around the nation, covering wars and natural disasters, writing both breaking news stories and human-interest features. He has won numerous national and regional writing awards during his years as a reporter, 17 of them spent at the Miami Herald.

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